By CHRIS POWELL
If you want to see where Connecticut’s cities are, you don’t need a road map with their names on it and the densely populated areas highlighted in yellow. A report the other day in Connecticut’s Hearst newspapers carried a map of the state with orange dots signifying schools with good scores and blue dots signifying schools with bad scores on the recent proficiency tests issued by the National Assessment of Educational Progress.
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The sad blue dots correlated perfectly with the impoverished cities and some of their inner suburbs — including Hartford, East Hartford, Bloomfield, New Britain, Waterbury, Danbury, New Haven, Hamden, Ansonia, Bridgeport, Stratford, Windham, Norwich, and New London.
The happy orange dots were almost uniformly elsewhere.
For those who didn’t immediately grasp the correlation, the map also included the percentage of each municipality’s students who qualify for free or reduced-price school meals, with high percentages signifying poverty. That helpful data won’t be available much longer now that, with poverty worsening, state government is making school meals free for all students in all towns.
But even now the free-meals data isn’t necessary to understand what long has been going on in Connecticut’s schools — why students in wealthier municipalities score much higher than national averages and students in the poor municipalities score much lower, with some of the latter scores showing that Connecticut has students who are several grades behind where they should be.
Decades ago at the outset of the computer age the Connecticut bureau of the Associated Press gathered all sorts of data about the state’s schools and found that the academic performance of students correlated only with the property wealth of their parents — not with school spending, teacher salaries, or teacher experience.
That is, educational success was and remains mainly what it has always been, a matter of parenting.
As Connecticut might have learned by now from the chronic student absenteeism in the schools of its poorest municipalities, it’s hard to educate children whose parents don’t reliably get them to school.
Chronic absenteeism is an overwhelming clue about the essential problem of education. But this clue has not yet been heeded by the state’s elected officials and school administrators, insofar as they have yet even to wonder aloud if their policy of advancing students from grade to grade and graduating them from high school regardless of their academic performance might be breeding contempt for education.
Since the correlation of poverty with terrible academic performance is so great, it would seem that education could be improved greatly if government set about to try to understand poverty’s causes and to distinguish policies that tend to eliminate poverty and promote self-sufficiency from policies that tend to perpetuate poverty and dependence on welfare.
Since most children in the impoverished cities and inner suburbs are growing up with only one parent and thus with only half the parenting that, within living memory, was the natural order of things, the collapse of the family would seem to deserve urgent review. What has made people and government think that two parents aren’t really necessary and that unearned self-esteem beats self-reliance?
But so far state government’s response to poverty has been only to throw money at it without regard to results.
Along these lines, the Yankee Institute’s Meghan Portfolio recently reported that while Connecticut has been increasing its minimum wage annually for seven years, the state’s poverty rate has barely changed, declining only slightly from 10.5% to 10.2%, even as enrollment in Medicaid, free medical insurance for the poor, has risen substantially.
This suggests that there is far more to earning power than indexing the minimum wage — that the decline in living standards, a decline in wage-earning power, is also a matter of the decline in education, which in turn is a matter of the decline in parenting.
In any case, while spending more in the name of education buys the votes of teacher unions, it doesn’t buy education. Poor kids in Connecticut don’t matter that much yet.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)
Chris Powell column 